Gabriela Sato-Polito, Institute for Advanced Study
When
Refreshments served at 3:00 pm in the 3rd Floor Atrium
TAP Colloquium
Gabriela Sato-Polito, Institute of Advanced Study
Title: Title: Pulsar Timing Arrays: a new window into the gravitational-wave sky
Abstract: Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) consist of a set of regularly monitored millisecond pulsars with extremely stable rotational periods that are used as precise cosmic clocks. The arrival time of pulses can be altered by the passage of gravitational waves (GWs) between them and the Earth, thus serving as a galaxy-wide GW detector. Evidence for low-frequency (~nHz) gravitational waves has recently been reported for the first time across multiple pulsar timing collaborations, opening a new observational window into the Universe. Although the origin of the GW signal is yet to be determined, the dominant sources are expected to be inspiralling supermassive black holes that merge following the merger of the host galaxies. I will discuss how pulsar observations are used to measure gravitational waves and what this new measurement can teach us about the population of the most massive black holes in the Universe.
Bio: I’m Gabi, a postdoctoral member at the Institute for Advanced Study working on gravitational-wave astrophysics and cosmology. I received my PhD in 2023 from Johns Hopkins University, advised by Prof. Marc Kamionkowski. I am broadly interested in exploring astrophysical observations to tackle questions regarding the origin, evolution, and composition of the Universe. My primary research interests are on measurements of low-frequency gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays and what we can learn about the most massive black holes in the Universe from them, which you can read more about in the research tab.
Before starting graduate school at JHU, I was an undergraduate in an interdisciplinary sciences program at Universidade de São Paulo, where I worked with Prof. Raul Abramo on the formation of large-scale structures in the matter distribution of the Universe.